Uh oh-- looks like Apple's playing the Name Game again. The Name Game is the way in which Apple manages to dodge clauses in licensing agreements by arbitrarily changing the names of their upcoming products; it's sort of a semantic shell game. And it's the kind of behavior that you might expect to see emerging from Redmond or thereabouts, but instead it's running rampant in Cupertino. For an example, consider the story of a Mac department who bought a Mac OS subscription license a couple of years ago, and who has now been told that Mac OS X Server is not covered under the terms of the agreement. A MacInTouch special report has the details.

The license was purchased through Claris and was set to expire in June of this year; it included upgrades for all new releases of the Mac OS until then for no extra cost. "Rhapsody Unified" is specifically included under the terms of the license, so the purchaser of the subscription license called Apple to obtain Mac OS X Server-- the closest thing to "Rhapsody Unified" that Apple has ever shipped, or is going to ship. But Apple's lawyers have decided that Mac OS X Server is not the same as "Rhapsody Unified" (which is, of course, true) and therefore it isn't included in the subscription. And since the whole subscription program no longer exists, the contract can't be extended past June, so Mac OS X can't be included either. Sound a little iffy? Apple has a point, but we're a little bummed at the way they're handling this. After all, Rhapsody Unified was supposed to ship last year; it's not the licensee's fault that Apple missed its delivery dates and changed their OS strategy. We would have liked to see them agree to provide Mac OS X Server-- or, better yet, to extend the subscription license to include the full desktop version of Mac OS X, which is much more in line with the spirit of the agreement. Somehow we doubt that's going to happen, though.

If this scenario is conjuring up vague feelings of déjà vu, it's not because your synapses are misfiring. (Your synapses probably are misfiring, but that's not why Apple's move seems so familiar.) Apple launched a similar stunt a couple of years back as the secret weapon in the Clone Wars. See, way back at the dawn of time, the Mac world was anxiously awaiting a new operating system code-named Copland. Once Apple formally announced details of Copland's upcoming release, it was officially known as "Mac OS 8." But Copland fell apart at the seams even while Apple kept improving the then-current System 7.5. First they released System 7.6, and when System 7.7 was ready to ship, Apple suddenly decided to call that "Mac OS 8," even though it really wasn't what anyone expected Mac OS 8 to be: it was essentially a tweaked System 7 with a Coplandesque look slapped on top. This screwed the cloners, whose Mac OS licenses only covered "System 7.x," so they suddenly found themselves unable to ship their computers pre-loaded with the latest Apple operating system. Ah, semantics-- what a glorious tool when weaseling out of unwanted license agreements...